It is a truism that, “if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.”

And so it is with Trenton. We don’t know where we’re going, and so far, it’s pretty clear we haven’t gotten anywhere good.

Ask five Trentonians what their goals for the city are and you’ll likely get five different answers. Try asking 7 city council members. Or, try getting an answer from our Mayor at all.

Leadership is painting a vision and lacing it with measurable goals.

To miss-quote John F. Kennedy – “We choose to go to somewhere in space in the future”. Not much of a call to action is it.

As a community we don’t have a common set of goals that represent our vision and drive our mission to revitalize the city. We need that. We need our leaders to be thoughtful about how our policies and our budget are used to achieve goals. We can’t do everything, so being clear on the things we must do is job #1.

It’s hard set measurable goals

Goals are meaningless if you can’t recognize when they’re accomplished. Too many people forget this. A goal doesn’t help if you can’t measure achievement, or the progress towards achievement.

Every meaningful Goal has an outcome, and the challenge to writing meaningful goals is drafting a clear, precise, and measurable outcome.

To oversimplify, which goal stated below is meaningful?

To keep the citizens of the City safe from fire.

To keep citizens safe from fire by maintaining first engine response time to less than 3 minutes.

Note that meaningful Goals often describe an action or activity [although not always], but they always describe outcomes that are clear, precise, and measurable.

Think about measurement. How would I measure this? Can I accurately count the number of times something happens? Will I know when something happens? Can the administration cook the books?

These are all questions we need to ask ourselves.

Broad health goals set the agenda

For Trenton we have four basic concerns: We want our city to be safe from crime, for our children to be educated, for the city to be a pleasant place and for our government to be affordable. These concerns are not only interrelated but spill-over into every other part of life in the city.

Bad school environments breed crime, which makes us feel unsafe. When we feel unsafe we want to hire more police, which costs money we don’t have. However, if we don’t reduce crime we’ll not attract the new investment that would help us pay for a police force and a good school system.

Four broad goals can serve to focus us and our government policy on these concerns.

Ratables: Goal is $2.1B. in 4 years

That’s a 10% increase over the current $1.9B. Source: City tax rolls.

Ratables are what drive property taxes. In Trenton our property tax pays for 15% or our total municipal and school budget. The average for New Jersey is 50%. The State of New Jersey is under increasing pressure to decrease its funding to Trenton and we’ll need to make up the difference. However, to be a great city, we need to have a tax base that does more than maintain minimum services as we’re doing now.

Today the State of New Jersey funds $285M of Trenton’s school and municipal budget. If State property were taxed like private property, it would pay only $45M. Clearly we exposed to tightening budgets at the state level.

Ratables are measured in Trenton by the tax assessor and the tax roll is maintained by Trenton’s tax office. While property assessment is generally a well disciplined art, Trenton will need to update its processes and regularity for property value assessment.

Population: Goal is 90,000 people in 4 years

That’s up from 84,913 in 2010. Source: US Census – ACS

Growth in population shows that our city is appealing to outsiders. If we’re attracting people we’ve been successful in making the city livable for existing residents but we’re more attractive to businesses as well.

Population in Trenton is measured by the US Census bureau with a hard count every 10 years and an accurate estimate every year via the American Communities Survey.

Crime Index: Goal is a 20% decrease in one year, 40% in four years.

That’s from 3851 crimes in 2010. Source: Uniform Crime Report

The Uniform Crime report and FBI Crime Index report crime in a standard way and is a widely used statistic for assessing a community’s safety.

Graduation Rate: Goal is 90% graduation rate in 4 years

That’s up from the rate of 78%. Source: NJ DOE

Educators will argue over the use of this statistic but then fail to provide an alternative single measure for the health of a school system. A school system’s overall graduation rate, while not a perfect measure, is a good indicator of success and has the virtue of being well understood by the public. Furthermore, graduation from high school is a solid predictor of a student’s future success in life.

I hope that by publishing these four goals and our current state of affairs. We, as a community can begin to discuss them honestly. Perhaps we’ll change the targets up or down a bit, but in the end we need goals on which we can agree.

3 Responses to “Trenton’s Plan: Setting Goals”

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Want Trenton to be the most booming town in New Jersey and the talk of the nation?

Abolish property tax. Then buck the state and abolish state income tax and sales tax for those living within Trenton city limits.

The second step, which is equally important, would be to abolish the public monopolies. Markets will spring up (and with the tax rate mentioned above they WILL spring up) in street cleaning and security, education(yes education, this is possibly the most important one) and utilities. Charities and private companies alike will be competing in areas formerly dominated by government monopoly.

If you really want to super charge revitalization people must be given the choice of what school to send their children to (in addition to the monopoly being busted up). Schools can be set up at incredibly low cost when they aren’t run by a monopoly. Small schools on street corners, schools for only 20 or so kids, the return of the one room schoolhouse, etc. All kinds of wonderful things can happen when the prison/insane asylum model loses it’s forced attendance and coerced tuition. We’ll also need a blossoming, diverse market in education to serve the adults of Trenton who had to suffer through a Trenton public education and might need some help.

If you want to turbo charge development, drugs should be fully legalized as they were in the 19th century. Gangs will be stripped of their revenue source and much of their reason for operation, and will have no reason to operate in the city.

I appreciate your enthusiasm for wanting to revitalize the city, but I think what you fail to realize is that people don’t respond to plans. Planning human activity creates chaos, and chaos creates order.

If you want to see every single square inch of Trenton used to it’s maximum potential, this is the path.

Natty Law, Your suggestion is an “eliminate government” suggestion. While I appreciate the small government thinking, no government isn’t likely workable.

As for legalizing drugs, while I may agree with the idea, what would be most helpful are thoughts that we can conceivably implement. That said, having an ideal state is useful and certainly anything that can be done to starve the thugs is useful. They cost us a lot of money.